Trade & Goods
Sogdian Merchants
The Sogdians were the most important long-distance merchants of the early medieval Silk Road. An Iranian people whose homeland lay in the valleys of the…
The Sogdians were the most important long-distance merchants of the early medieval Silk Road. An Iranian people whose homeland lay in the valleys of the Zerafshan and the Kashka Darya, in what is now Uzbekistan, they ran trading colonies from the Oxus to the Pacific between the fifth and the ninth centuries. The Sogdian merchants are the central actors in the Silk Road economy of the Tang period, and their language served as the lingua franca of long-distance trade across Central Asia for almost half a millennium.
The Sogdian homeland
The Sogdian heartland was a fertile region in the middle course of the Zerafshan river, dominated by the two great cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. The region had been incorporated into the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the sixth century BCE, and the Achaemenid administrative and commercial infrastructure gave the Sogdians an early start in long-distance trade. The Sogdians emerged as the principal commercial brokers of Central Asia and retained that role for almost a thousand years.
The prosperity of the Sogdian homeland depended on agriculture, in particular on the irrigation system that channelled the waters of the Zerafshan across the surrounding plain, and on the overland trade that linked Sogdiana with the markets of Iran, China, and the steppe. The Sogdian cities developed a distinctive material culture, with painted wall plaster and a tradition of manuscript illustration.
Sogdian merchants abroad
The Sogdians established trading colonies in every major city along the Silk Road, from the markets of the Levant to the Chinese capital of Chang’an. The Chinese sources refer to them as hu, a generic term for Central Asian merchants, and the literature of Tang China is full of references to Sogdian merchants and Sogdian wine. A Sogdian colony was established at the Chinese capital in the early Tang period, and the Sogdian quarter of Chang’an was one of the principal foreign quarters of the city.
The Sogdians are, of all Silk Road merchant communities, the best documented.
The Sogdian trading colonies were organised by family and by firm, and the firms maintained agents in every major city. A consignment of silk might be loaded in Suzhou, consigned to a Sogdian agent in Chang’an, who would arrange transport through the Hexi Corridor and the Tarim Basin to Bukhara, where a partner would use the proceeds to buy Central Asian horses or jade for the return trade. The Sogdian letters discovered at the frontier post of Dunhuang in the early twentieth century give a vivid picture of this system.
The Sogdian funerary couches — wooden couches covered in Sogdian-style painted figures, found in Tang tombs as far as Chang’an and Luoyang — are the most evocative surviving material traces of the Sogdian diaspora. The Shanghai Museum has a particularly fine example, as does the Hermitage. The reader who can see one in person is looking at a Sogdian merchant’s memory of his homeland, painted for his descendants in China.
A personal note
The Sogdians are the most important merchant community of the early medieval Silk Road, and they have been heavily romanticized in modern popular accounts (notably Valerie Hansen’s The Silk Road: A New History). The Sogdian commercial network was real and important, but it was not the only network, and the other Iranian-speaking merchant communities (Khorasani, Sasanian, post-Sasanian) deserve more attention than they usually get.
Further reading
If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
- One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.